She told them that the landing everyone would remember as one pilot’s heroics had in truth been two people dividing a thing too big for either of them alone, and that this was not a failure of heroism but the whole of what heroism actually is, most of the time, when it is real.

The strongest pilot in the world, she said, is still only one person, and the sky is bigger than any one person, and the day you forget that is the day the sky teaches it back to you at a price you cannot afford.

They did not fully understand her yet.

That was all right; understanding would come to them one at a time, in their own cockpits, on their own hard days, and some of them would remember the woman with the scuffed helmet and the plain sentence on the board and it would help.

She had not been able to give Gabriel anything on his last day.